Teresa Reviews Ms. Ma: Nemesis, The Moving Finger (2018)

Teresa reviews Ms. Ma: Nemesis, The Moving Finger (2018) and is looking forward to seeing what happens next.

(Ms. Ma: Nemesis, episodes 5-8)

(c)2024 by Teresa Peschel

Agatha adjacent: 4 hangings

Poison pen letters and even more poisonous gossip? Agatha wrote the book with The Moving Finger (1942).

Quality of episodes: 4 hangings

The overall story is carefully expanded while telling this heartbreaking mystery.

Read more of Teresa’s Agatha Christie movie reviews at Peschel Press.

Also, follow Teresa’s discussion of these movie on her podcast.

Episode four set up this mini arc when poison pen letters were delivered to a few of Rainbow Village’s residents, among them Ms. Ma and Ko Mal-Koo, the thug with a taste for ornamental flowers. When we left Ms. Ma, she was cornered on a street by the law. Inspector Han was about to arrest his escaped crazy murderess when a mysterious young woman (Seo Eun-Ji) pops up and insists her auntie Ms. Ma is who she claims to be: the reclusive mystery writer.

To make the identification more solid, Eun-Ji is with two people who claim to be from Ms. Ma’s publishing house and where’s that next book, missy? Your public and our presses are waiting! They all insist she’s their wonderful mystery writer and it’s a weird coincidence she’s got a murderous psychotic doppelgänger. Inspector Han gets no support from the Rainbow Village police and must back off. But he’s sure he’s right.

During this series of episodes, you’ll see a scene with him and Prosecutor Yang. Watch carefully and you can almost see him beginning to change his mind about Ms. Ma’s guilt.

In my previous review, I speculated that Ms. Ma was either Miss Marple (playing nemesis for her daughter’s murderer) or Clotilde, the woman who murdered Verity Hunt rather than let her grow up and live a life of her own. Watching Prosecutor Yang not just refuse to reopen the case but threaten Inspector Han over the very concept is suspicious. Too suspicious. Why a prosecuting attorney doesn’t want to confirm the truth if she developed an airtight case is … interesting. Perhaps Prosecutor Yang has something to hide about what she did or didn’t do when prosecuting Ms. Ma, child murderess.

Let’s go with the nemesis theory: Ms. Ma is innocent and was railroaded into that high-security asylum for psychotic killers. Then who murdered her daughter? And recall, Min-Seo’s face was bashed in so there’s some doubt that it really was Ms. Ma’s daughter and not some unlucky girl of the same age, size, and wearing the same school uniform.

Meanwhile, despite quitting the force after an argument with the prosecutor, Inspector Han is keeping tabs on Ms. Ma. There’s a murder to be solved, and she’s at the heart of it.

She’s making it easy for him. Not only does Han know where she lives, she’s gotten involved in a much bigger case in Rainbow Village than a missing backpack or a stolen credit card. Poison pen letters have begun surfacing. Everyone seems to be getting them. Since the letters are written in Korean and are rarely translated for an American audience, we must guess what vicious gossip they’re spewing. Whatever it is, unlike The Moving Finger, they seem oddly specific to the recipient.

In the novel, one of Miss Marple’s major clues was the letters, while vile, were written by someone who was not familiar with village scandals. She deduced that the letters were a screen designed to conceal murder. If someone tied into village gossip had written them, they’d be far more specific.

Here, based on not necessarily adequate subtitles, few translations onscreen of the letters, and how the characters reacted, I must assume whoever wrote the letters was somewhat tied into the village grapevine.

The gossipy villagers seemed to think so. The first death is of a young man whom Ms. Ma and Eun-Ji find inside his unlocked house, hanging from his ceiling. Suicide. They’d seen him arguing with a young lady in the streets. But Ms. Ma, seeing his private living space, infers that whatever his relationship with the young lady, it’s one-sided because he’s gay.

Eun-Ji, who has attached herself to Ms. Ma despite refusing to identify herself, assists in the investigation of the man’s background because she is up on modern technology. Ms. Ma isn’t; that nine years in an asylum kept her from keeping up.

Ms. Ma believes, based on her intuition and experience, that the hanged man was murdered. Why, she doesn’t know yet. Meanwhile, she repeatedly meets Choi Woo-Joon, the young son of Madame Park and Attorney Choi. In Korea, women keep their family name while their children are given their husband’s family name. Woo-Joon showed up in the last arc when Ms. Ma solved his missing backpack problem. He’s a nice kid, about the same age as her daughter was when she died. He’s got problems with bullies that Eun-Ji and Ko Mal-Koo solved for him better than Ms. Ma does. But she learns Woo-Joon’s secret. He wants to become a chef, not the high-powered law career his parents plan for him.

The boy is devastated when his mother, Madame Park (Mrs. Symmington), dies of suicide by weedkiller. She leaves a note which her husband identifies as being in her handwriting. Her poison pen letter, the cause of her suicide, suggested that her son was not fathered by her husband. Woo-Joon is equally upset by this cruel gossip and keeps returning to Ms. Ma for assurance. Haunted by her daughter, Ms. Ma is torn between her affection for Woo-Joon and memories and guilt caused by her daughter’s death.

Her interference with the case leads her to being dragged to police headquarters in Seoul (I think). She must be guilty! She’s a stranger with a suspicious past, and she’d showed up at two separate crime scenes. While she’s at police headquarters, she has a cup of juice and when she’s called for her interview, Inspector Han seizes the cup to collect her fingerprints. But while she’s being interviewed, Madame Park’s maid is murdered, proving Ms. Ma can’t be guilty.

If you know the novel, you know who the murderer is. It’s Attorney Choi (Richard Symmington) What will surprise you is how Yum Yoon-Hye (Elsie) is handled. She’s not the innocent au pair who, all unknowingly, lured Richard Symmington into becoming a murderer. She participated in his plot.

Equally interesting is that the poison pen letter was correct: Woo-Joon isn’t Choi’s son. Devastated by his mother’s death and then again by how his father treated him, you suddenly wonder what happened to Richard Symmington’s sons at the end of The Moving Finger. Agatha never addressed what their father murdering their mother did to them. Ms. Ma: Nemesis gives you an idea. Woo-Joon is hauled off by Child Social Services to await his estranged older sister coming from America to take him someplace else, away from everything and everyone he knows.

I don’t know if he’ll be back. I hope so, because it was delightful watching Woo-Joon draw Ms. Ma out of her shell and vice-versa. But his father was a despicable man (the gossips were right about that, too) and he’ll live with the knowledge forever.

But did Attorney Choi write all the letters? As I said, they were often very accurate. Too accurate, you might say, for an attorney who only heard village gossip secondhand from his wife.

We’ll see what happens next!